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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#11

Post by icc97 »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
Kenji wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

You still can have all your own data though in a useable form, all you need is IMAP. So it's better than social networks albeit not as decentralised as we'd like

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#12

Post by logicallee »

For anyone who doesn't know, the www is a a "hypertext" project where documents can contain links to each other. By clicking these links, a wide variety of content is exposed. For example, consider how much easier it is to use Wikipedia than to have to look up references in the index (page numbers by word occurrence) of a printed book. You can just click on a link and follow it. In all, most people spend most of their online time reading pages that have hyperlinks in it, which they follow.

It's certainly a paradigm shift similar to what Gutenberg accomplished.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#13

Post by krona »

Kenji wrote: post #4
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

That was essentially the promise of RDF, OWL, The Semantic Web, Web2.0 and so on. After swimming in that stuff for 3 years in the early 00's, I could tell back then that it was mostly a boondoggle, and even though those technologies have found their niche, the project failed for the same reason that the original WWW was successful.

It was like 'AI' in the 80's, but with XML.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#14

Post by madiathomas »

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives.

EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#15

Post by noblethrasher »

madiathomas wrote: post #14

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

I think you meant 20th (or 21st) century.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#16

Post by kayoone »

Kenji wrote: post #4
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

diaspora probably was the most popular failed project which tried to achieve this. It did not really fail per se, but it's pretty clear by now that it will never reach impactful adoption.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#19

Post by sametmax »

jacquesm wrote: post #5
sametmax wrote: post #2

And soon will win the big brother award for accepting DRM ?

Tim Berners-Lee is not the equivalent of the W3C (though he did vote for EME). I think the main reason to allow this is that otherwise the only effect is that the same thing will happen in a non-standard fashion with Apps and other binaries being the way to access protected content. That said, I'm not happy with it either and I wished that the web would remain DRM free, the only reason it has the adoption that it doe…

Bullying in schools will happen anyway. Should we create a standard so that it's done properly, in a way everybody can reproduce ?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#20

Post by jacquesm »

sametmax wrote: post #19
jacquesm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Berners-Lee is not the equivalent of the W3C (though he did vote for EME). I think the main reason to allow this is that otherwise the only effect is that the same thing will happen in a non-standard fashion with Apps and other binaries being the way to access protected content. That said, I'm not happy with it either and I wished that the web would remain DRM free, the only reason it has the adoption that it doe…

Bullying in schools will happen anyway. Should we create a standard so that it's done properly, in a way everybody can reproduce ?

That's a dumb analogy. Bullying is one-sidedly bad, hence there being a bully-victim relationship which is non-consensual.

Content owners have - in principle, legally backed - the right to distribute their content in any way they see fit, and content consumers have the option to refuse that content if the format it is presented in is un-acceptable to them, this is a consensual producer-consumer relationship.

If you feel 'bullied' to consume content with DRM the problem lies with you, you do not have an automatic right to content in a particular format. If you do not agree with that the solutions are to be found in the political realm, not in the technical realm.

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